Bio: 

After studying for her BA (English, 2017) and her MPhil (European, Latin American and Comparative Literatures and Cultures, 2018) at the University of Cambridge, Aistė completed her PhD in Italian at Cambridge under the direction of Prof. Heather Webb in 2022. In 2022, she was Research Fellow at Vilnius University and Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. At UCC, Aistė is working on her first monograph, based on her PhD research. Her research interests include dream and visionary literature, the illuminations and illustrations of Dante’s Comedy, and the interconnections between English and Italian literary traditions. 

Research project: 

My interdisciplinary project, entitled ‘Dreams and Visions in Dante and the Italian Middle Ages,’ investigates the representation of multisensory dreams and visions in Dante Alighieri’s Vita nuova (c. 1294) and Commedia (c.1308-1320). Approaching Dante’s dream writing from the perspectives of the history of the senses and cognitive literary studies, I aim to answer the following questions: what role does the body play in dreams and visions? How do visionary literature and images convince and persuade readers? Can imaginative experiences shape and mould our waking reality? These questions remain partly unanswered in the twenty-first century, but they equally troubled late medieval writers. Situating Dante’s writing in the broader philosophical, theological, and scientific context of the Italian Middle Ages, I seek to demonstrate how Dante’s dreams fit within, and have shaped, contemporary discourses of dreaming. 

Dr. Elaine O'Callaghan (BCLG, PhD) works as a researcher on the  ID+ Project  at UCC, focusing on the right to inclusive education for people with intellectual disabilities in higher and further education. Prior to this, Elaine worked with Professor Conor O'Mahony in his role as the Irish Government appointed Special Rapporteur on Child Protection, contributing to multiple reports including Proposals for a State Response to Illegal Birth Registrations in Ireland (2021) and A Review of Children's Rights and Best Interests in the Context of Donor-Assisted Human Reproduction and Surrogacy in Irish Law (2020). Elaine previously worked with Dr. Kenneth Burns, Dr. Fiachra Ó Suilleabháin and Olwen Halvey on a study of social media abuse and harassment in social wor

Dr Julius-Cezar Macarie - ISS21 Institute For Social Science in the 21st century

Short bio: 

As a night ethnographer and migration scholar, for the past decade Dr Julius-Cezar Macarie (or MacQuarie) has reached out to migrant nightshift workers because he is concerned with their invisibility from public debates, political agendas, and scholarly fields. He founded the NIGHTWORKSHOP and campaigns for migrants’ rights with the NIGHTWORKER CHARTER. Dr MacQuarie was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Research Fellowship to carry out this research. The project runs from Sept. 2022-Aug. 2024.

Project Outline: 

Funded under Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), PRECNIGHTS project addresses the topic of labour migration and precarity, specifically regarding women migrant nightworkers (WMNs) in Ireland. It intends to contribute with novel theory on differential inclusion of WMNs and impact related scholarly debates as well as help advance migrant workers’ rights. The primary aim is to make WMNs visible by examining precarity, migration, gender and nightwork, and how each dimension magnifies the lived experiences of the others. Project work will allow an inclusive analysis of the lack of WMNs’ ‘power and privilege’ and the forms of ‘oppression and inequality’ they face.

PRECNIGHTS is an ambitious anthropological project on labour migration and precarity, focusing on the essential, yet invisible, women migrant night workers (WMN) in Ireland. Through an innovative interdisciplinary and ethnographic approach, the research will impact scholarly debates on migration, and will inform key Irish and European stakeholders on migrant workers’ rights.

PRECNIGHTS’ objectives are to:

1. Unpack how are WMN expected to perform their gender in nightwork;
2. Explore factors that affect WMN’s responses to invisibility and precarity;
3. Examine how management practices and work culture impact WMN’s understanding and crafting of their self-presentations; and
4. Unpack the structural invisibilisation and precarisation   of WMN.

PRECNIGHTS is hosted by ISS21, University College Cork, under the supervision of Dr Caitriona Ni Laoire, whose background and expertise in qualitative multi-modal research and socio-spatial dynamics of inclusion/exclusion are at PRECNIGHTS’ core.

 Contact: 

For information on the project contact: Dr Julius-Cezar Macarie (jcmacarie@ucc.ie). Follow on twitter at: @precnights

Gustavo Souza Marques - School of Film, Music and Theatre, Department of Music

Gustavo Souza Marques is a postdoctoral researcher for the CIPHER Hip-Hop Interpellation project; a five-year, 2-million euro study of Global Hip-Hop knowledge flows on six continents, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Dr. Marques works as a Latin Americanist covering the Caribe and Americas (Central and South) for the project which aims to create a collaborative hip-hop platform on the Internet.

Dr. Marques main interests as a scholar is postcoloniality, critical race theory, hip-hop culture, media and performance studies 

Email: GSouzaMarques@ucc.ie

Dr James Chetwood - School of English and Digital Humanities

Biography: 

James is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Digital Humanities. He completed a PhD at the University of Sheffield (2017) which re-examined the transformation of the personal naming system of medieval England between c.800 and c.1300.  

Before arriving at Cork, James taught in the History Department at the University of Sheffield, the School of English at the University of Nottingham and was Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Hull.  

His first article ‘Re-evaluating English personal naming on the eve of the Conquest’ won the Early Medieval Europe Prize and the Paul E. Szarmach Prize. A monograph based on his PhD research is under contract with Amsterdam University Press.

Project overview:

My current project focuses on the transition between late antiquity and the early medieval world. It examines personal names of the people of southern Britain between c.350 and c.800 to add a new dimension to the ongoing debate around the adventus saxonum – the so-called ‘coming of the English’ to Britain.  

The fate of Britain and the Britons in the post-Roman period is still a topic of much debate, and much disagreement still exists between historians, archaeologists and linguists. Personal names are the perfect tool to bridge this disciplinary divide. They are linguistic items which respond to grammatical rules and are influenced by linguistic change over time. But they are also items of ‘immaterial culture’, which can be chosen, ‘worn’ and passed down from generation to generation, or discarded when they become unfashionable.  

My project will combine linguistic, historical and digital humanities methods to examine personal names through both these lenses. I will collect and analyse names of different linguistic origins, compiling them into a comprehensive database. This will allow me to conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses into the names, their chronological and geographical distribution, and the historical people who bore them. In doing so, it will answer the following research questions: 

• What was the ethnic and linguistic make-up of the Romano-British population on the eve of the adventus saxonum? 
• Where did names of non-English origin persist in early medieval England, and for how long? 
• To what extent do changes to the linguistic origin of names reflect patterns of migration or shifts in ethnic and linguistic identities? 
• What kind of people bore non-English names, and is there evidence they were seen as socially inferior or marginalised? 

A final aspect of my project will be to examine the relationship between personal names and ethnicity in this period. Recent debates have questioned the usefulness of ethnicity as a category of analysis in early medieval Europe. The data collected will allow me to explore how early medieval people conceived and demonstrated ethnicity, including the extent to which people used names as markers of ethnic identity. 

Dr Donna De Groene - School of the Human Environment: Geography, Archaeology and Classics

Donna de Groene is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Archaeology, on the INSTAR project New Pastures.  

Donna is a zooarchaeology and isotope specialist, studying human-animal relationships in prehistory. She obtained a PhD at the University of Reading, part of and funded by the ERC MENTICA project (MENTICA - The Middle East Neolithic Transition: Integrated Community Approaches (reading.ac.uk)), Her research focused on the earliest animal management and domestication strategies employed during the Neolithic Transition in the Zagros Mountains of Iran and Iraq.  

Dr de Groene is the lead zooarchaeologist on the IRC -COALESCE funded project ‘New Pastures’ led by Dr Katharina Becker, Department of Archaeology. The project is funded under Strand 1 L – Instar – by the National Monuments Service of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage in partnership with the Heritage Council and supports Irish National Strategic Archaeological Research. 

Project Outline

The project ‘New Pastures’ project will address central gaps in current understanding of the 1st millennia BC and AD by utilizing the abundant data generated by the infrastructural schemes of the recent past to create new knowledge about animal husbandry practices, settlement modes and lifeways of the Iron Age. 

The cutting edge, interdisciplinary research strategy combines zooarchaeological and isotopic analysis, Bayesian modelling and Ancient Genomics to the study of the remains of sheep, goat, cattle and horse found in Ireland. This will create a completely new understanding of animal husbandry practices of the Iron Age in all their facets and address fundamental questions about the subsistence base and lifeways of Iron Age society, previously not studied in Ireland. Dr de Groene will conduct sampling for, and analysis of isotopic analyses for carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and strontium isotopes with project partner Professor Derek Hamilton of Glasgow University, and work with Professor Daniel Bradley and his team at Trinity College on the study of the ancient Genomics of Later Prehistoric and early historic herbivores  

The project is interdisciplinary and collabo